Aligning poetry lines flush that begin with left quotation marks

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by odedta

Hitch, why wouldn't a table solve this?

odedta:

If the poetry is short enough, you could get away with it, assuming that each stanza was in its own table, and each line in its own row. Remember that a) oldest Kindle devices don't recognize tables AT ALL, so you'll have a muddled mess with no fallback coding to save you; b) if a table is too long on most Nooks (too many rows), the device will simply flip PAST the entire table, as if it doesn't exist--you can't scroll through an overly-long table. The device flips to the next-screen-in-sequence, after the end of the table. c) Long tables in Kindle = no-no, because K2's and up to the mid K-3's (and, actually, not 100% sure about the new DX'es) will "lose" the table formatting if the table's rows carry over onto a new screen, as if the device loses its mind.

There's another reason I can't pull from inside the hollows of my brain, but those are the biggies. This is the ePUB forum, so really, we only care about b), here, but b) is a real doozy, and remember: you can't CONTROL the vertical size of the table, given that people can resize the font. If ancient Mrs. Jones sizes her fonts to uber-large, and the tables resize throughout, you could be in for a very nasty surprise. I remember the first time the "disappearing table" stunt happened to me...that was quite unpleasant, when I had a client who thought I'd omitted all their carefully-cultivated tabular data...but they'd resized it via font sizes, and the tables all disappeared, with the "page numbers" jumping a few digits at each "gap." Rude, that.

FWIW. As they say, your mileage may vary.

Hitch

[mrmikel]

What is a crying shame is that ereaders have been out long enough to have had these issues resolved and we are still little better than things were five years ago.

The epub people fiddle with the standard to accommodate video without even fixing simple text things.

If you stick with Apple or Kindle, you still aren't any better off. More googas and still you can't lay out a poem that doesn't blow up. Phooey!

[Derek R]

Yes, Hitch, you are quite right - it dawned on me after the last post (I'm a bit slow to recall these days). So I suppose its a choice between using a little extra left margin to lines or adding in quotation marks where necessary and using the "visibility: hidden" property. Neither is perfect.

[SBT]

Sigh... well, if visibility is not according to spec, what about setting
<span style="color:white">«</span>
Yeah, I know, it won't work in ereader programs that set a background like Aldiko and CoolReader. Perhaps you can force a white background with body background:white?
visibility:hidden works in ADE, anyhow.

[Jellby]

This works in Firefox. I'm pretty sure it doesn't in ADE, but at least it degrades gracefully and doesn't require spurious text:

<div><span style="direction:rtl;width:0;float:left;">"</span>Testing line</div>
<div>secondline</div>
<div>third line</div>

[Derek R]

It's hard to believe that something so relatively simple is still so hard to crack, isn't it? And, yes, I did think about the above but now I'm inclined just to forget about the alignment in epubs (and mobi) in the meantime and simply let the subsequent lines align to the quotation mark. It's not pretty, but it makes life simpler, I suppose

[Derek R]

Thank you, Jellby, I'll experiment with that tomorrow and see how it works.

[odedta]

Originally Posted by Hitch

odedta:
If ancient Mrs. Jones sizes her fonts to uber-large, and the tables resize throughout, you could be in for a very nasty surprise.

I can't believe people still use those old devices :/

[Jellby]

Sorry, I shouldn't have written that it degrades gracefully, since it doesn't. But it's possible to have a conditional CSS for ADE (and, besides, "direction" is a required CSS property in ePub 2.0.1, so if it doesn't work it's entirely ADE's fault).

[Jellby]

On the other hand, this may work in ADE, but "inline-block" and "position" are not required properties in ePub 2.0.1 (and it requires two additional spans):

<div><span class="hang"><span><span>"</span></span></span>Testing line</div>
<div>secondline</div>
<div>third line</div>

span.hang {
    display: inline-block;
    width: 0;
}
span.hang span {
    display: inline-block;
    position: relative;
    right: 0;
}
span.hang span span {
    margin-left: -100%;
}

[Derek R]

I haven't done tests in the wild, but the first method using the "direction" properly displayed perfectly in my text/html editor. I couldn't get the second method to work in an html file, but it did work in an xhtml file, although the quotation mark ran into the first letter until a right margin was added to it (and a corresponding left margin to the subsequent lines).

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Derek R

I haven't done tests in the wild, but the first method using the "direction" properly displayed perfectly in my text/html editor. I couldn't get the second method to work in an html file, but it did work in an xhtml file, although the quotation mark ran into the first letter until a right margin was added to it (and a corresponding left margin to the subsequent lines).

Whew...somewhere this thread took a left turn (ha!) and now we're talking right-to-left. HOWEVER, to get back on topic:

Seriously, on the poetry, just use a small hanging indent of a few px/ems/whatever blows your skirt up. Don't give up on it, just because it won't align perfectly. That way lies madness.

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Seriously, on the poetry, just use a small hanging indent of a few px/ems/whatever blows your skirt up. Don't give up on it, just because it won't align perfectly. That way lies madness.

This is exactly how I would handle it. Won't work on every single font someone can throw at it, but will work GOOD ENOUGH on MOST fonts and font sizes.

[Derek R]

Roll on the hanging-punctuation property!

[odedta]

The hanging-punctuation property is a CSS 3 rule and is not supported in all major browser, I would use text-indent instead to be backwards compatible and work on most if not all devices.